Category Archives: Environment

Like I said “porcupines,” “Korean women” and many others like “how to say hello (or thank you) in Korean” are dominating the traffic on the blog these days. For a snippet of the rest of the popular posts, check out the following WordPress stats for The Real “South” Korea: Continue reading →

Friday and Saturday, February 1-2, to Commemorate World Wetlands Day (Feb. 2)

The Korea Wetland Project (koreawetland.org) is a nationally executed Ministry of Environment project, supported by UNDP and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) that is working with local communities to protect globally important wetlands in the ROK.

Thousands of volunteers from the public and private sector have already responded to the Hebei Spirit oil spill (Dec. 7); however, there is still a lot more work to do on the ground. Continue reading →

Nobody doubts anymore that climate change is at least in part man-made. And even if the effects of global warming remain at the most benign end of the predicted range, it will be a disaster of unprecedented proportions. For years, that disaster has been unfolding so slowly that it’s been invisible. But now you can see it: Mountain glaciers around the world are melting, along with North polar sea ice and the ice cap atop Greenland; droughts are baking the U.S. southwest, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa; floods are devastating Bangladesh; and Central America is reeling from powerful hurricanes. Not all of these events can be tied absolutely to global warming, but all of them will surely become more frequent and intense as the world warms — ultimately threatening the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people. Continue reading →

This network of thousands of international scientists has been around since the late 1980s, but it was in 2007 that the IPCC — charged with forging a scientific consensus on climate change — really made its mark. In its fourth assessment report on climate change, which comprised a series of reports released throughout the year, the IPCC made the final case that global warming is real, and that humans are the main cause. The IPCC also detailed the potential consequences of unchecked warming, and produced a road map for the kind of economic and technological changes needed to avoid the worst-case scenarios. Climate change is a momentous challenge, but the IPCC — which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore this year — has shown us the way. Continue reading →

Lately, I’ve been realizing that the letter “E” is the first letter in many of the words that affect us today. The EU which is growing in prominence and power in the world. Energy is of paramount importance and value in today’s economy. Related to Energy, the Environment is of vital concern for our short, medium and long term futures. Education consistently dominates the minds of many of us parents for the future of not only our children, but the intelligence of the masses and our employed. In my pursuit of the ideal curriculum, I’m thinking that “Economics” should be taught more frequently and have higher importance in primary education. Keeping with an economic theme, Emerging markets appear to dominate the International Economy as well having growth rates that are phenomenal compared to the slow rate of the developed countries.

Perhaps the reason why educators skip the letter “E” in our public school grading system and go from C to F is because the letter E was just too important to use?

Environment, Energy, Mobile Internet Are This Year’s Most Debated Issues

By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter

The science and technology section of a newspaper is often its most cheerful page, since its stories tell about new inventions, innovations, evolution and natural wonders. But this year, the primary tone of the science sections was rather grim. The global warming issue and its threat was selected by science journalists in South Korea as the most critical scientific issue of 2007. Continue reading →

On a bus ride from Changwon city to Busan just a few minutes ago, I had this strange feeling I was just sucking in a bunch of Carbon Dioxide sitting in the back of this long inter-city bus. When I first sat down in the back, I was wondering if it was just me or was it a leak at the back of the bus? However, I didn’t know what to do if I was wrong. So, I just sat there wondering if this was really a bad leak, was I just sitting in a death chamber in the back along with several other passengers? Most of them probably have smelled it before and so it probably wasn’t a big deal, but I was sitting thinking, what the heck? Continue reading →

What’s the worst that can happen? An Inconvenient Truth. Global Warming.

I’ve been lucky enough to see the first video & it’s in the next post since I found it on Youtube. I originally ignored it for a while on my facebook funwall because let’s just say funwall gets to be a little too spam like at times. However, I’m starting to see that some of the forwards on funwall are decent — especially this one. I’m glad I felt like I had a few minutes to look it over because it just pounds in the fact that we should be acting in response to the global environmental problems. Continue reading →

Sometimes I wake up with a profound thought unable to erase it out of my head until I splatter the thoughts here…

While this may not be the first time someone’s thought of it, I wonder how many people have been thinking of the negative repercussions of globalization. A majority of what I’ve seen and read says globalization has done this planet wonders including sharing one anothers’ cultures, increasing the GDP of countries that used to be poor, and possibly placing the world back on a track where we can hopefully some day solve the worlds’ environmental problems. However, did we realize that it may be the main cause of the latter? Did we realize that “sharing” would actually help the world undermine its’ own self? Continue reading →